I live in Hong Kong where I'm opening a branch office of my digital marketing firm MWI, which is headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. In addition to Forbes, my writing has also been published in Entrepreneur, Fast Company, VentureBeat, Business Insider, TechinAsia, and the South China Morning Post. I focus on entrepreneurship, startups, online marketing, and Asia. Born and raised through high school in Arcadia, California, I also spent two years at college in Idaho, two years in the Amazon as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (aka Mormons), and 15 years in Utah, first at Brigham Young University studying information systems management, and then working for various startups including a few of my own. In June, 2013 I moved to Hong Kong where I'm opening a branch office of my online marketing firm MWI and learning Cantonese and Mandarin with my wife and two children. My hobbies include skateboarding, triathlon, reading, and blogging. I write about entrepreneurship, startups, learning from success and failure, online marketing, innovation, and anything lean. If you have a question or suggestion, email me. I'm always looking for good ideas and great startups to write about.

Why Long Form Content Marketing Works, And Why It Doesn't

The common wisdom about marketing is that people are busier than ever, have short attention spans, and are riddled with ADD – therefore, the only kind of marketing that can work must be concise, clear, and get its message across in 0.5 seconds or less. Otherwise, an advertiser risks losing the attention of his audience, right? Nonsense. Enter long form content marketing.

What is Long Form Content Marketing?

There’s no trick to understanding the term “long form content marketing.” It’s marketing, delivered through content such as writing, audio, or video, and it’s long – meaning longer than a 30 second TV spot, a one-page magazine ad, or a billboard. While there is no exact definition of what “long” means, most experts peg it at 1,200 to 2,000 words when it comes to the written form.

The UK based digital marketing firm Builtvisible just launched a new long form content marketing piece called Messages in the Deep: The Remarkable Story of the Underwater Internet. This webpage talks about the efforts and challenges involved in laying underwater cables on seabed floors around the world, incidents in which those cables have been damaged or cut, and how government agencies, like the NSA, have tapped into such cables to aid in its spying efforts. It is indeed a remarkable story, culled from over 40 sources, and a remarkable example of long form content marketing, comprising efforts from at least six members of the Builtvisible team. As a writer and web designer, I can appreciate the substantial work that went into this informational resource.

“We created the piece because we think our entire industry is moving more towards long form, in-depth looks at interesting subjects and content that’s visually appealing,” said Darren Kingman, Creative Marketing Associate at Builtvisible. “We also wanted to see just how far we could push ourselves, hence not only the design and development time that has gone into it, but also the contributions.”

Other examples of long form content marketing include the Twilight, Harry Potter, and Hunger Games book series, any movie based on characters from Marvel Comics, and The Lego Movie. Oh, you didn’t realize that was a two-hour long advertisement you paid good money to watch? That’s because the best long form content marketing doesn’t make one feel like they’re being marketed to.

Why Long Form Content Marketing?

Because when it’s done right, in the right circumstances, it works. I tend not to read case studies on websites. For this reason, I long believed case studies should be brief. On my own firm’s website, I kept them short and to the point. That changed when I was introduced to the website of Teehan+Lax, an interactive design firm in Canada. I started reading their case study describing how the firm had aided in the initial design of Medium, the blogging platform started by the co-founders of Twitter, Evan Williams and Biz Stone. The case study is long. It took me around 20 minutes to read, but I couldn’t stop. It was well written, well designed, and fascinating. But when I finished, I was puzzled. Why had I just spent all this time reading a case study? I left the tab open on my computer for a month, trying to figure out what Teehan+Lax knew that I didn’t. I knew they were on to something, and I needed to understand it.

I unintentionally experimented with long form content on my own firm’s website, which was in the process of a major redesign. In creating a page about the history of my firm, I decided to write it all out, just because I felt like writing it. It was more for me than for an audience. The page was not linked from the homepage, and is not placed prominently anywhere else. I have never had visitors to our website send me unsolicited comments about our website, but I received positive feedback on that page. In fact, when the site was launched I had only written half the content for that page, and I was forced to finish it in a hurry because of the visitors who began emailing me, demanding the rest of the story. And yes, in some instances we have been able to identify that content as leading directly to client engagements.

“Now I just need to make all the pages on my website really long, and I’ll get better SEO results and people will love reading what we say on our website and they’ll buy lots of our stuff, right?” If only it were that straightforward.

When Does Long Form Content Marketing Work?

Read a bit more about that experiment by Basecamp and you’ll see that while long form content in one situation increased conversion results, in another, it had the opposite effect. And when it comes to SEO, content marketing expert Bill Belew says long form content is only to be used judiciously, under the right circumstances. Belew taught a class where his students launched blogs and then competed to see whose blogs could generate the most organic traffic from search engines. “Posting quality, bite-sized articles multiple times a day versus once a day produced more than 10 times the organic search results.” says Belew.

Wait, so sometimes long form content helps with conversions, and sometimes it hurts, and sometimes, long form content is better for SEO, but other times it’s worse? Precisely. After reviewing the literature, I was able to distill some general guidelines to help you make sense of it:

When and How to Use Short Form Content Successfully

Short form content is often ideal for striking, visual content or short, compelling posts that quickly convey your message. For certain blogs and sites, posting short content multiple times per day can generate large amounts of organic search traffic in a short period of time.

It is important to note that quality must be maintained, even if you are posting new content multiple times each day. Regardless of whether content is long or short, good, quality content is what gets shared and leads to conversions.

When and How to Use Long Form Content Successfully

When you need to generate search traffic that converts to signups, long-term relationships, and larger amounts of organic traffic over the long term, long form content is often more effective. Quartz editor, Kevin Delaney, argues that articles should ideally be either less than 500 words or 1,200 words or more, and to stay away from the traditional 700 word article.

Why was I so smitten with the Medium case study on the Teehan+Lax website? Why did people gravitate to the longest page on my firm’s website? It’s not just that they’re long. It’s not merely that both of these pages tell stories. “We simply asked ourselves: What would we want to know about this project?” says Geoff Teehan, co-founder of Teehan+Lax. “This of course meant we’d be treating our audience like our peers; that perhaps our prospects are actually our peers anyway. Realizing we were writing these for ourselves was the first big step. The second was to create a framework to tell great stories.” I discovered by accident what Teehan+Lax already knew–if you create content you like, others will probably like it as well.

Long form content marketing pieces can also become successful if they provide actionable tips. Moz’s free Beginner’s Guide To SEO has been visited over 1 million times, and according to Majestic SEO has been linked to more than 36,000 times. It is perhaps one of the greatest pieces of long form content marketing ever created.

If you’re looking for a bulleted list of tips for creating your next long form content marketing piece, here you go:

Tell secrets, just like Moz gives complete instructions on how to do your own SEO

Include imagery and great design

Don’t expect it to be easy or quick

Use A/B Testing to Customize For Your Audience

Even if you see long form content working for a situation similar to yours, content marketing is not an exact science. Every website is different and caters to different individuals. For this reason, it’s important to use A/B testing, as Basecamp did, to determine what is best in your particular situation. But A/B testing must also be done with care, as Jake Peterson points out in his article Are You a Victim of Your Own A/B Test’s Deception? Dig into the data, or you risk only seeing the data that supports what you already want to do. You also need to enter an A/B testing scenario with a feeling for what might work, says Jamie Dihiansan from Basecamp. ”Designers should already have an understanding of what works and what doesn’t based on research and/or professional experience,” says Dihiansan. “If you’re using A/B testing without having a strong viewpoint then you’re just grasping at straws.”

Long form content takes time to create and promote. A/B testing also takes time and effort. But if you’re willing to put in the investment as Builtvisible, Moz, Basecamp, KISSMetrics, Teehan+Lax, and others have, customizing the approach to match your specific situation, you’ll become the next long form content marketing success story.

Joshua Steimle is the CEO of MWI, a digital marketing agency with offices in the U.S. and Hong Kong.

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Hi Joshua, you hit upon something that is getting a lot of attention in content marketing discussions, and that is storytelling. The short form content is good for fast, actionable content, but with the long form content you describe, people can really get to know you as you tell a story that takes longer to write and longer to read. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

Great article Joshua! Thank you Thank you!! I’m having a crazy time with this issue as I try to get traffic to my website. I do post some pretty provocative blogs on my to build my traffic but often times I’m stuck on whether they’re too long or too short. I like the fact that you pretty much split the difference, the key is to make sure the content is “INTERESTING”…..if it is the length doesn’t really matter. Thanks for the EDUCATION! http://ah2andbeyond.com/brand/ www.ah2andbeyond.com

I think long-form marketing is overdue for some recognition. With so many snippets of piece-y and biased information that is floating around on the Internet on several topics, companies, and ideas, people are becoming more skeptical and more discerning of what they’re reading. I have definitely found this to be true running my own business, www.prosemedia.com. Sometimes, it helps to understand the bigger picture so as to form a more intelligent opinion.

Joshua, unlike any other self generated content, when it comes customer stories (case studies, success stories, customer videos, etc) – it finally boils down to the customer – how much the customer is willing to share and how much air-time you get to capture everything. I would strongly not-recommend to make the content “long” for the sake of it. If you have enough meat then go for it by all means. but don’t write a long texty story if the only thing you want to do is showcase credibility and customer proof. because unlike other content, customer story content serves 2 purposes – reader engagement and proof of credibility.